Curriculum Rooted in Africa, Built for the Church

 What would it look like if every pastor became a shepherd who makes shepherds? This intensive two-week course is built around three interlocking goals: deepening the pastor's own walk with Christ, equipping them with simple and reproducible disciple-making tools, and sharpening their discernment to protect their flocks from false teaching. Beginning with Jesus's three invitations — to be with him, to abide in him, and to rest in him — the course moves through gospel clarity, personal holiness and integrity, multiplication vision, oral Bible storying, shepherding against false teachers, and building a disciple-making church, culminating in a concrete six-month action plan each pastor carries home. Designed for oral learners in rural East Africa, the course leans into storying, discovery questions, accountability triplets, and small reproducible group models — tools any pastor can use immediately and pass to the next generation. 

 Every human being inhabits a story — and the central question is whether we are living God's story or someone else's. This richly layered course equips pastors to know, interpret, and live the grand narrative of Scripture, moving from the power of stories to shape identity and purpose, through the seven-act drama of salvation history and the three marks of the Church's mission — evangelism, compassion and justice, and creation care. The second section provides hands-on training in biblical interpretation across the major genres of Scripture — narrative, law, poetry, wisdom literature, letters, and prophetic texts — using Elizabeth Mburu's African Hermeneutics as a key guide. The course concludes with six spiritual formation practices designed to help pastors cultivate an attentive, prayerful life with God. 

What does it mean to be a Christian — not just in name, but as a citizen of a new kingdom, called and empowered to live differently in the world God has placed you? This five-session course traces the full arc of discipleship: from the nature of saving faith and the dimensions of God's call on our lives, through the stages of spiritual growth, to the inside-out transformation that the Holy Spirit works over a lifetime. Drawing on Scripture, the African cultural context, and the writings of key thinkers in spiritual formation, participants explore what whole-life transformation looks like — not as a self-improvement project, but as a relational journey with a God who is actively conforming his people to the image of Christ. 

If Introduction to Christian Theology asked who God is and what he has done, this course asks what it means to live together in light of that. Picking up where the first theology course left off, this eleven-session course moves through the nature and purpose of the Church, the calling and empowerment of its leaders, and the theology of worship — before spending five sessions guiding pastors through the interior life of spiritual formation. Drawing on the four postures of receiving, remembering, responding, and relating, pastors are equipped not only to teach their congregations how to grow, but to model what a life of deepening intimacy with God actually looks like. Practices introduced throughout the course — breath prayer, the Examen, soaking prayer, journaling, and Communion — give pastors tangible tools to take back to their communities.

 Every pastor is a theologian — the question is whether their theology is sound. This twelve-session course introduces the central doctrines of the Christian faith, from the nature of God and his self-revelation, through creation, humanity, sin, Christ, salvation, the Holy Spirit, and spiritual warfare, to what happens after we die. What sets this course apart is its deliberate engagement with the traditional African worldview: each session brings Christian doctrine into honest conversation with traditional beliefs, identifying points of connection for witness and points of divergence that require discernment. Grounded in the work of African theologian Samuel Waje Kunhiyop, the course treats theology not as abstract knowledge but as the lifeblood of pastoral ministry — always leading to worship, transformation, and mission. 

 Intimacy with God rarely deepens through the same two or three practices repeated indefinitely — it grows the same way any relationship does, by doing life together. This five-session course introduces the foundations of Christian spiritual formation and guides participants through four formational postures — receiving, remembering, responding, and relating — drawing on the work of James Wilhoit, Dallas Willard, and Adele Calhoun. What makes the course distinctive is its emphasis on experience over information: nearly half the time is spent in practice, as participants try breath prayer, soaking prayer, the Examen, journaling, lectio divina, Communion, and communal prayer — not as techniques to master, but as ways of keeping company with the God they already love.  The spiritual formation practices introduced here form the backbone of Pastoral Theology: Life in the Community of God. 

 Suffering is not a theological abstraction for the pastors EMG serves — it is the daily reality of their congregations. This four-session course takes that reality seriously, beginning with where suffering comes from and moving through how God responds to it, how to suffer faithfully, and how to care well for others in crisis. Drawing heavily on Diane Langberg's Suffering and the Heart of God, the course holds together honest lament and enduring hope — equipping pastors not only to understand suffering theologically, but to sit with it pastorally. Participants learn the practice of lament from the Psalms, encounter the God who enters human darkness rather than observing it from a distance, and are challenged to follow Christ's movement from glory into suffering on behalf of those they serve. 

 Pastors who preach and teach God's Word bear a sacred responsibility to handle it well — especially in a context where false teaching is a constant threat. This three-day workshop introduces the goal, source, and process of biblical interpretation, framing the task as a journey from the pastor's own world into the world of Scripture and back again — for the sake of transformation, not merely information. Using Elizabeth Mburu's African Hermeneutics as its primary guide, the course equips pastors with a culturally rooted four-legged stool approach to interpretation and then puts those skills to work across the major genres of Scripture: narrative, law, poetry, wisdom literature, letters, and prophetic and apocalyptic texts.  The interpretive framework introduced here was later expanded and integrated into Entering and Living the Story of God. 

 Preaching is a sacred task — not a platform for personal gain or a mere transfer of information, but an "advanced listen" to what God desires to speak to his people through his Word. This two-day hands-on workshop guides pastors through a practical framework for developing and delivering sermons that both inform the mind and inspire the heart, drawing on Kenton Anderson's homiletical method from Choosing to Preach. Participants work collaboratively in small groups to develop a full message — discerning the central point, crafting a memorable big idea statement, engaging the human story, anticipating objections, and casting a vision for transformation. Pastors leave with both a method they can use immediately and a deeper sense of the weight and wonder of the preaching task. 

 This is the foundational course from which much of EMG's subsequent curriculum has grown. What is the Church, what is it for, and how does it actually work? This five-session course works through the biblical foundations of ecclesiology — exploring the Church's nature through three rich metaphors (People of God, Body of Christ, Temple of the Holy Spirit), its purpose through God's Three Greats (the Great Commandment, the Great Commission, and the Great Community), and its structure through the servant-oriented leadership roles of the early church. The final two sessions bring it all to life, examining worship as a transformative encounter with the Triune God and discipleship and mission as the Church's calling to make disciple-making disciples. Throughout, pastors are invited to contrast the marks of a healthy church with the counterfeit marks that disfigure it — and to assess honestly where their own communities stand. 

 What does it mean to worship God — and why does it matter how we answer that question? This five-session course roots the practice of worship in its biblical and theological foundations, drawing on four Hebrew and Greek word groups that together paint a far richer picture of worship than any single definition can capture: worship as embodied gesture, as disposition, as service, and as journey. At its heart, the course argues — drawn from the research behind Dr. Davis's dissertation, Worship as the Demonstration of Loving Allegiance — that worship is the fulfillment of the Great Commandment: loving God with all that we are and loving our neighbor as ourselves. These two loves are not separate commands but a single, mutually informing matrix of allegiance to God expressed in how we live toward others. From that foundation, the course explores how worship transforms us, how liturgy and spiritual disciplines form us as worshippers, and what it means to live a life of worship ethics in the world. This course, alongside A Theology of the Church, forms the theological foundation on which EMG's entire curriculum is built.